


a thousand lightyears away

by Sheblet (salem112)



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Gen, Sisterly Love, my kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 17:11:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5464439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salem112/pseuds/Sheblet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A follow-up to 1x06, Red Faced: The aftermath of Kara's fight with Red Tornado and the emotions it dredged up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a thousand lightyears away

You find her with her mother.

The hologram of her mother, that is. She sits in silence before the towering, vaguely see-through image of the woman. The hologram’s light, slightly mechanical imitation of Alura’s voice asks “Is there anything you would like to ask me?” but Kara interrupts and just says “No. I just want… I just wanted to see you.”

“Very well,” the hologram says, and they fall into silence again. You don’t move, feeling suddenly guilty for having interrupted. Kara knows you’re there, she has to, even if the door slips open soundlessly her superhuman hearing always picks up on your footsteps, no matter how light. Years spent trying to sneak out at night with a Kryptonian in the bed next to yours taught you that much.

Finally you say, “Hey, you. It’s late. You should go get some rest.”

Her slouched shoulders tense only slightly when you break the silence. “I thought that door could only open for me,” she says, but there’s no heat and your heart sinks at how dead her voice is.

“Emergency override,” you offer by way of explanation. “I couldn’t find you. I was worried.”

“What made you think I didn’t just go home?” She’s still sitting cross-legged, her back to you, and she hasn’t so much as turned to look at you, which worries you only a little. She’s changed into her civilian clothes, and an oversized cardigan makes her look even smaller than usual.

“You never leave without telling me first,” you say matter-of-factly. She lets out a dry laugh.

“I’m nothing if not predictable.”

You sigh. “C’mon, Kara. I’ll drive you home.”

“I can get home just fine on my own, thanks,” she says, almost bitingly, and you’re surprised. Your sister gets mad often, sure, but this is something different. Something colder.

She’s getting up now, and you approach her, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“Kara, you’re tired,” you say. “You’re –“

You stop when she turns, and a gasp tears through you at the sight of her eyes. They’re red and a bit puffy, the skin around them inflamed, shiny, as if burned.

“Kara,” you breathe. “Oh, my God.”

“It’s fine,” she grumbles stubbornly, jerking away when you try to touch her face, and you can feel the shame and embarrassment rolling off her. “I just… overdid it with the… heat vision. A little.”

“A _little_ ,” you repeat, a half-scoff half-laugh escaping you.

She unfolds her glasses, which you hadn’t realized she’d been holding the whole time, and slips them onto her face. She hisses the instant the rims land on the agitated skin.

“All right, that’s enough,” you say sternly. Kara recognizes this immediately as your “Eliza voice” and looks sheepishly up at you. You reach out and gently slide her glasses back off, folding them and tucking them into your back pocket.

The glasses are a mask, that much is true. Sure, they hide her identity, keep Supergirl separate from Kara Danvers. But they also hide what’s inside. Without the reflective lenses to protect her, everything that’s tangled inside of her shows through her eyes for you to see with perfect clarity.

“You can’t fly like this,” you say, still doing your best mom impression. “The wind will just irritate them more. And you sure as hell can’t ride public transportation looking like that. People will think you’re diseased.”

She laughs at that, a rough sound. “All right,” she says, voice crackling like gravel underfoot. You remember with a painful suddenness the screams that had torn their way from your sister’s small frame only hours before, leaving her voice weak and her throat raw. You didn’t know that kind of sound could ever come from her. Kara, your baby sister, who might have a temper but is still the most gentle being you’ve ever met, who used to be scared of popcorn makers and is still a little scared of cats, who is soft around all of her edges and who you’ve hardly ever heard yell in all the years you’ve known her. Even when she did raise her voice, it was never like that. It was never that painful, that full of rage. You think the memory might haunt you forever.

You hold her hand the whole way to your car. She doesn’t react at first, but by the time you make it to the parking lot her hand is clutching yours so tightly that for a moment you consider telling her to _relax, Hulk, you’re breaking all my fingers,_ but you think better of it.

She needs this, after all, and what else are sisters for?

\--

She used to get nightmares.

They were most prevalent in those first few months after she first arrived on Earth. She’d wake up screaming, or she’d jolt upright in bed with a sharp gasp. Sometimes she would just weep softly, only stopping once you woke her.

The screams were the worst. Your parents would come charging down the hall every time, and they held her until the memories subsided, if only a little. No one got much sleep around that time, but you couldn’t blame her. How could you, when she looked like that – face bathed in moonlight, tears making tracks down her face, her eyes far away and terrified? How could you ever hold that against her? She was lost, and even at 14 you knew that.

She was afraid of a lot of things in those days, though she didn’t like to admit it. The popcorn maker was a big one – she hid under the table like she was expecting a bomb to go off. Your parents seemed unsure what to do, but you just slid under the table beside her and showed her how the machine made delicious food. She was particularly fascinated with the salt, which she called “tiny white crystals.” She still calls it that, actually, and it’s nothing less than endearing.

She was afraid of the blender, too. Pretty much any appliance that made any kind of loud, offensive noise was a no-go for her. Sometimes you wondered if it reminded her of the loud noises her pod made when it took off, or of the sound of her planet, her home, combusting while she watched.

In any case, you held her hand on movie night and when Mom made smoothies in the summer. You climbed into bed beside her when she woke gasping from another nightmare.

Eventually, though, she stopped needing you to hold her hand. She stopped having the nightmares.

Or, you think now, maybe not.

Maybe she just got better at hiding it.

\--

You order takeout. You notice how she eats only one pot sticker instead of her usual five or six. Your chest has been aching since you got to her apartment and she wandered over to the window, staring out at the night sky. Light pollution masks most of the stars, and in this moment that infuriates you. Kara has had her world destroyed and has been living with that fact for 12 years, she at least deserves to be able to look at the damn stars and remember home.

When you were kids, it somehow never occurred to you that she’d be homesick. You knew she’d miss her parents, and her life, but you never realized just how different Earth had to be from Krypton. How she probably missed the little things, like the way the air on her planet felt. Her house. The ground beneath her feet.

As you watch her watching the stars (or at least, those that can be seen) you wonder what that must have been like. You imagine having to leave Earth and never come back, having to leave everyone and everything you ever loved behind. A tightness forms in your chest and you can’t breathe.

You come up behind her and put a comforting hand on her shoulder, squeezing lightly. She puts her hand over yours.

\--

At first, your brain doesn’t register the screams.

For a moment, in your sleep-addled state, you think the sound is your alarm. You fumble around, searching for your phone so you can shut it off, and in the process fall out of bed. Disoriented, you think that you don’t remember your bed being that narrow.

Then you remember you weren’t in your bed, or even in your own home, for that matter. Instead you’d been sleeping on Kara’s couch. After you insisted on staying over to make sure she was okay, she’d tried getting you to share the bed, like you used to do when you were kids, but you laughed and told her that you were adults now and it was silly for two grown women to share a bed. Now as you try to disentangle yourself from the five blankets Kara had given you (“Humans get cold, right?”) you regret your words.

As your brain kicks back into gear and you rejoin the waking world, you realize that the sound you’re hearing isn’t your alarm. Instead you recognize your sister’s voice, breaking as she cries out. You scramble to your feet and run for the bedroom door, calling her name the whole way.

You find her with her face pressed into her pillow, weeping and speaking in what at first sounds like gibberish but you soon realize is Kryptonese, her first language. Tears are soaking her pillowcase and you realize with a horrified jolt that she is still asleep.

You put a hand gently to her face, murmuring her name. The touch is all it takes for her to jolt awake, flinging herself so hard into a sitting position that the resulting gust of air blows your hair back.

“Whoa, okay,” you say soothingly, hands hovering, unsure whether she wants to be touched. It’s been so long since you’ve had to do this, been so long since you’ve seen her in this state, you can’t remember what to do next.

“I saw it,” is all she says, and she has that faraway look in her eyes she always used to get when she was remembering something thousands of lightyears away. That’s where she is now, back in that pod, watching her home disappear before her very eyes.

You remember what your parents used to do for her when she got this way, and suddenly you know what to do next.

“Hey,” you say softly. Very tentatively, you grab her face with both hands and make her turn towards you. “Look at me.”

She does, and it takes everything in you not to look away. A thousand years of hurt and fear and anger stare back at you, and it’s hard for you to imagine anyone harboring that much inside of them, let alone the bright soul in front of you.

“Can you tell me where you are?” you ask. Her jaw works, and she opens and closes her mouth a few times but no sound comes out. You see the slightest hint of recognition in her face as she remembers the routine from so long ago.

“It’s okay,” you encourage. “Just relax. Where are you?”

“I’m-I’m-I’m on Earth,” she finally manages to get out, voice rasping. “I’m in my apartment.”

“Good. Who am I?”

Her eyes soften. “Alex,” she says, and then like that wasn’t enough, “My sister.”

“Look around. Are you safe?”

She looks around her bedroom, at the sheets tangled around her legs and the window opened just slightly because she likes the cool air when she sleeps. Finally, she looks back at you, and you can see the tension has ebbed from her face just a bit when she says “Yes.” She’s breathing easier now.

“That’s right,” you say, horrified when your voice cracks a little. “You’re home, with me. And you’re safe. What you saw was a thousand lightyears away, and you were looking at it through a telescope. Okay?”

She nods, and reaches up with one hand to rub at her eyes. “It felt like it was happening all over again.”

“I know,” you say, trying your best to understand. You want to understand, but you know you never will. This is a struggle entirely her own, and all you can do is hold her hand while she fights.

“Do you need anything?” you ask as she lies back down.

She looks a bit nervous and ashamed when she answers. “Stay with me?”

You smile. “Of course. Anything for my baby sis.”

You climb into the bed next to her and her head finds its rightful place against your shoulder. She’s asleep again in minutes, already snoring like a damn tractor. You smile. She’ll be okay.

Even though she’s asleep now, you stay. It’s the least you can do.

She needs this, after all, and what else are sisters for?


End file.
